


Dust, like golden ash

by Goonlalagoon



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: His Dark Materials AU, I'm almost certainly going to have to add more characters to the list as I go, Not just daemons AU I promise, Now AU from end of Echoes though may well tie in some RtD elements, This is old and incomplete but lately i've been sort of thinking about it again?, but think this is all the key characters who've shown up so far, so I figured cross-post it and get my notes back in order
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-07-08 03:57:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19863124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: The antics of a study group in Rivertown go about the same, with their souls running visible alongside them (except for the two that are in hiding, curled safe in a hidden pocket and gliding in the clouds, respectively). Their first frantic trip to the mountains is about the same too - but when the dust settles after old secrets and old lies have been dragged to light, things go a bit different.Laney Jones can tear through the walls of the world. She'd hadn't realised before that there were so many of them pressed together, bubble thin skins seperated and joined only by the fires of the Elsewhere.(A Leagues and Legends!His Dark Materials AU; inherently canon divergent but core plot wise actually divergent post Echoes)





	1. pt 0 - some (rambly) thoughts on daemons

**Author's Note:**

> From the original tumblr post:   
> Skimming through some prompts and got thinking about a Beanstalk!daemon AU. I can’t remember if ink-splotch has ever specified the squad’s daemons other than Sally-Ann and Sez’s, but here’s some of my rambly brainstorm/first thoughts stuff...spoilers for Echoes.

When Sally-Ann’s daemon settled, no one was really surprised that he chose to be a housecat (if “chose” was the right word). She was homely, comforting and independent (and with a fierce set of claws if you threatened what was hers). Sez’s sheepdog was a surprise to those who didn’t know her well enough. People thought she’d have something sly and crafty, like a fox or snake, but that was because they only saw the way she did things not who she was. Their daemons were regularly found curled up in a patch of sun in the fish shop, the cat napping on the sheepdog’s shaggy fur.

It’s Rupert who has the fox, a beautiful sandy fennec vixen who curls her perfectly cleaned tail around her paws and flicks her pointed ears, the picture of elegance because they both know his uncle’s cronies are looking for any sign that she’s(he’s) wild or unsuitable or flawed (when Laney meets Rupert his daemon is one of the first things she notices, not just because someone’s daemon is a good place to start but because she’s seen those foxes all her life and she looks a little like home).

All mages have a bird daemon (in the mountains, if your daemon flickers into a bird even briefly it’s cause for panic) so Laney has a (very) tame raven who perches on her shoulder whenever she’s in the room and she pretends that the fire in her hands is brushed out of his feathers (and wonders where exactly she’s tearing through to when she reaches for it). She smiles and tells people he doesn’t talk to anyone but her and likes his solitude, while in her top pocket a little chameleon peeps out through minuscule eyeholes and listens and watches everything. Grey hides his daemon too, a mountain hawk who soars overhead and roosts in a tree by the window at night, while Grey carries a little grey mouse in his pocket. He sneaks off to talk fairly often, but a hawk would be too difficult to hide in a shared room so they live with the separation, quietly miserable (it gets easier once Jack knows (it also means he has to dust the room more, because Grey doesn’t have to try to pull the golden fire from his daemon’s presence, and it leaves a golden residue that can’t all be explained by Laney’s frequent presence)).

When she first settled, Jack couldn’t help but be disappointed that his daemon was a red squirrel. He wanted…he wanted something fierce, impressive, something that showed he was someone. But she leapt along in front of him, fur catching the light, and he realised he quite liked being someone adaptable and agile. Squirrels are small and sweet and look unimpressive, but they chatter and bite when cornered, and as he got older that suited him (so did her handy ability to creep through small gaps and unlock doors (and in one memorable escape, gnaw through a frankly worrying amount of wood)). George rolls her eyes when he finally tells her he wished for something bigger (before the giant and realising being small could be a strength) and absently pets the little moth on her shoulder, an unassuming Spotted Apatelodes. Since her village fell to fire, only she knows her daemon is a gynadromorph, and some days she’s glad to no longer deal with the confused looks of the more flashy species shifts. In her dark moments she despairs that even her very soul is ashy grey and bears the rough shape of a dragon (she settled late, but before the dragon her daemon had most commonly looked like a boar - loyal, intelligent, fierce when cornered but really just wanting somewhere peaceful to root for food and lay down to sleep).

They’re an odd group, these three Legends with their unexpectedly unimpressive daemons. Liam’s spent all of a few minutes in his childhood as anything other than a bird, settling into something strange with a musical whistle in it’s throat. They peeped duets at each other, golden fire flickering in it’s wake like dust in sunbeams, the residue mixing with the sand (or caught in Laney’s cupped hands while her daemon flapped wings that never quite felt right). In the mountains he heard the whistles when they needed to be quiet and turned to say hush, and realised it wasn’t her. Bea gave him the name for his soul when they met - the white-throated sparrow, affectionately called the whistler of the North - and her elegant, fierce mountain cat sniffed curiously at the desert dust on his boots, whiskers curled in wry amusement.

After her father died, Bidi’s daemon spent a month refusing to turn into anything with wings or song, the magic in the world gone out, but then one morning he flickered and piped out that familiar whistle. Bidi cried (so did Bea) but they were healing tears. The only thing anyone knows is that Bidi’s will settle as a bird (and they quietly know that’s the point they’ll really be in danger, because the Seeress can spot a settled bird for miles, and has cages ready for them). Cassandra Graves has a bird-eating snake looped around her neck, eyes cold and dark and unblinking. She wonders what it means, that her daemon takes the form of something that would kill her brother’s daemon for food. She wonders if it stung, when his daemon shaped itself like hers to twine companionably together when she was having a bad day (a little, but she was worth it).


	2. part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A whistle stop tour of the canon events of Beanstalk & Echoes, feat daemons and how they do and do not affect what happens - i.e. spoilers for major plot beats of both books, nothing in much detail but also the associated content warnings (mentions of violence, kidnapping, reference to the mage trade/slavers)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the original Tumblr post:  
> So, uh...a while back I decided to have a go at picking out daemons for (some of) the Leagues and Legends characters, and then some ideas for plot arrived and...well.
> 
> The fic isn’t finished yet - I’m currently writing part five of Probably About Ten - but as it sounds like the final book is coming out in the nearish future I figured I needed to get the first part or so posted to a) motivate me to finish, and b) get it posted in part before RtD is about as it won’t take account of canon events in the third book.
> 
> From now:  
> Well, I definitely did not succeed in getting this one wrapped up before RtD came out, which is most of the reason why I ran out of steam on it at the time

Laney Jones refused to believe she wasn’t a mage until her daemon settled, chameleon hide shifting and shaping to whatever it needed to be. She looked at her hands, remembering clutching at golden fire that left dust in the creases of her palms, and reached out in rage and desperation (in determination). She tore through the walls of the world and scooped fire out, the ash mingling with the sand as her daemon turned golden yellow, stark against her dark skin. She raised a raven from the egg, smiling blandly when her family asked about it, and by the time she trekked to Rivertown with golden fire knotted and tamed around every limb, he would sit quietly on her shoulder and just close his eyes whenever someone other than her talked to him. It took practice to get deft enough at opening up her doors into the Elsewhere to make it seem as though she was merely preening through his feathers, but Laney persevered. She was used to practising, night after night, until the things she wanted to be able do worked perfectly every time.

She wondered where, exactly, she was reaching through to, but it wasn’t until after she’d walked through that golden realm with the terror clutching her heart (not of the fire – she’d learnt not to fear the Elsewhere long ago – but of the way she was offering her secrets up for Jack and Grey) that she started to think she might be able to find out. The battle of Rivertown went about the same in this world – none of that changed with their souls running alongside them, except unknown to any of them Grey’s mountain hawk cannoned out of the sky when slavers pounced, stunned by the sudden numbing of an unbreakable bond, and later glided far overhead as they ran through the town to face the monsters who had crawled out of the rift until they were out of everyone’s sight before dropping down to hover around Grey and pour out magic, Laney grabbing bright handfuls as it drifted down around them with every beat of those feathered wings.

When Laney was caught napping by the slavers, they laid hands on her daemon, the tame raven. It didn’t react the way they’d expected, and Laney had to act as though her very soul was being tortured. Laney was a good actress, but they were suspicious, wary. It is hard to pretend that something has wrapped around your soul and is _squeezing_ , to pretend to freeze and become powerless (Laney had spent a long time ensuring she was never powerless). The chameleon steeled itself and slipped under the raven’s feathers to let the man’s finger just brush pebbled skin, and Laney was no longer acting when she vomited on the floor before they dragged her away, leaving Gloria bound and sobbing, still trembling from the feel of someone touching her own shocked daemon.

The mountains went about the same too. This was old lies and history, dark things and bitter struggles. This was different, though: the humans went into one half of the cage, their daemons the other, and then –

 _Just a little cut_ , a woman in a similar-but-different world would tell her daughter, explaining she was only trying to eliminate sin from the world.  
_Just a little cut_ , a man in this world had told his children again and again, explaining that they were only doing what was fair, what was best for the world.

Sam Graves had looked at diagrams of wire mesh and guillotines, generators that sucked the explosion of fire from the severed link and stored it, turned it to the kind of energy that powered lamps, and tried not to think about what that cut would feel like when it was their turn, when Yeshe settled with feathered wings, when they couldn’t hide, couldn’t – Cassandra slipped books into Sam’s trembling palms and made quiet plans to keep the pair of them safe from their father (from her).

This was different: Rupert held a trembling mage’s hands, met their vacant stare, and willed them to be okay. Their blank-eyed daemon blinked, stretched, pecked anxiously. The human clutched their feathered soul as though they couldn’t bear to ever let go (again), and Rupert stared at his hands as though they didn’t belong to him while his Fennec fox vixen licked his ankle reassuringly.

This was not: Thorne arranged for Rupert to be snatched and locked away. No-one laid hands on his daemon, but she curled miserably in a cage with a fine mesh, an anchor to keep Rupert in place. Thorne was mostly interested in Laney and Jack, but he’d heard enough about Rupert to know he was important. Laney and Jack wouldn’t have joined his branch if Rupert was still out there leading a League.

But Thorne had heard stories that made him want Rupert for his own sake since he’d first dismissed the boy as of no relevance aside from the minor inconvenience of Jack and Laney’s loyalty. There were rumours of creatures that moved between worlds, creatures that took human shape and then moved on. There was a story about Rupert repairing the torn bond between a mage and their daemon (the stories made him seem like a towering god, but you didn’t get far in Thorne’s line of work without reading between the lines, before realising that most towering gods in stories were just people you wouldn’t look twice at in the street).

Smiling mildly and talking pleasantly, Thorne studied Rupert closely and wondered what kind of power surge the Graves would have experienced if they’d stuck this boy in one of their cages.


	3. part 2

It isn’t until after the mountains, after settling into the Bureau, that Laney wonders whether she could find Rupert through the Elsewhere. She mentions it to Jack, who thinks about it and suggests they ask Grey (a habit none of them will ever quite lose). The young librarian looks up, startled, when the knocking begins, and hides in a cubby-hole office to draw a protective circle. Laney talks it over at length, obediently shelving books, while Grey’s mind spins with possibilities, with careful experiments and a wistful longing to be able to walk into the fire without falling apart.

“Well, how is it you know when you’ve found me?” The look Laney throws over a pile of books is amused and slightly irritated.  
“You’re like a black hole from in there, pipsqueak. No-one else tugs on the fire like that.” Grey nods, still a little uncomfortable at the idea of being easy to find even by these people, while Yeshe shuffles clawed feet nervously on a tree outside.  
“Have you tried finding other people? I mean…how exactly were you planning to get back to the Bureau? I think they’ll notice if you walk in through the gates after the…what, three day ride?…from here, won’t they?” Grey sighs as Laney looks mulish. “You didn’t think about it, did you.”  
It hadn’t occurred to her that she might need to. Getting back to Jack had always meant finding Grey - before. She was quietly furious at herself for the oversight, and uncomfortably upset that it was no longer true. It was bad enough not having Rupert with them.  
“Guess we’re going to find out pretty quick if you _can_ find people other than me, then.”

Wandering through the fire of the Elsewhere, for a long time all Laney can find is the blazing hollow that is Grey, somewhere behind her. There are smaller sinks, which she realises are other mages and their daemons, drawing the fire through into the world. The Elsewhere is starting to take its toll when she comes across something new. A fountain of Elsewhere fire, the inverse of Grey’s magic pull, and she’s both fascinated and concerned. It’s hard to walk close to, a tide that pushes her away, and she skirts it. Aneirin shivers in her pocket, unsure, and Laney decides that discretion is the better part of valour.

Uncertain and unsettled, she pushes through the fabric of the world, meaning to open a window. Seeing only open fields, she steps out for air, to feel the ground solid beneath her feet for a moment. It’s not until something flies overhead with a roar like an angry dragon that she realises she is somewhere _wrong_ , because a machine of metal just went overhead. Scrambling to stand, she settles her fingers on a knotted thread, other hand dropping to her gun. The chameleon coils close around her ear (the raven stayed hidden in Jack’s room; she’s never risked carrying him into the fire of the Elsewhere. It would be too cruel if it turned out only humans and daemons could walk through unscathed - and she doesn’t want to have to replace him in a hurry, either), and turns gold in a fierce declaration that he is _not afraid_.

Footsteps nearby make her turn, and someone is staring at the gun in her hand with something that’s a mix of surprise and fear. Laney is puzzled. In a world where Things wander all over the place, someone in Academy or Bureau uniform with sword or gun at their hip isn’t exactly an uncommon sight.  
“Hello?” She calls, but the only response is a confused scowl, and a babble of some language she doesn’t know but feels she should (one day she’ll come back with a little more caution, and learn that it’s something called _English_ ). From the way they wave their hands, she thinks they want her to drop the gun, and she isn’t about to do that in a strange place. They get some kind of shiny box out of their pocket and start to talk urgently into it, and she doesn’t have to understand the words to know it’s bad news, so she tears the world open again and steps through, ignoring the scream behind her.

It isn’t until she’s in the Elsewhere again that she realises what was so disconcerting.  
“Did you see their daemon?”  
“They didn’t _have one_.” It’s unheard of, and Laney starts to feel desperate in her search for a way home. She opens windows almost at random, and nothing looks familiar. Finally her hand brushes through a flicker of fire that seems familiar, and she steps through into Jack’s room, his squirrel flicking her tail in relief. Jack takes one look at her and scurries to find a cup of water, and while she drinks it goes for two cups of tea. There’s a sign pinned to the headboard over his bed: _Remember to Hydrate!_ There’s one in Laney’s room as well, and Grey’s and George’s. There’s a spare, neatly lettered, in Laney’s locked desk drawer, waiting until Rupert is back and has a room to stick it up in.

Jack listens while she describes the strange places she saw, and fiddles with his mug. She stops halfway through a muttered contemplation on the idea of how there can be humans without daemons and glares at him.  
“You’ve been there.”  
“Not…not _there_ , as such, but…there was an Elsewhere crack in the Forest, for a while.” She stares. “I…may have tried to jump over it.” Laney buries her face in her hands, because his squirrel is smoothing her tail in a way that means Jack is both embarrassed and completely honest.  
“You _fell into an Elsewhere crack_ and didn’t bother to tell anyone.”  
“I didn’t want to worry mom.” Laney rolls her eyes, but she’s thinking about golden fire and what happens when you carry it into or out of the world. She’s always wondered where Jack’s cloak of luck came from. Later, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, Laney wonders what she brings back with her from the Elsewhere, unknowing. It doesn’t occur to her to wonder what she sets loose, unseen, when she tears the fabric of the world apart.


	4. part 3

Though she doesn’t discuss it with Jack, Laney sets aside her idea of using the Elsewhere for the time being. It’s pointless if she can’t find her way, and she isn’t reckless enough to wander aimlessly around in that world of golden fire on the off chance that she’ll find Rupert. She isn’t worried about the _after_ of that - she’d just take Rupert to Grey, and then they’d get Jack (and maybe George) and meticulously destroy whoever took their Hero. But she worries about ending up wandering for days, or stumbling into the wrong place, or exposing her abilities in a reckless rush.

Rupert is their priority, but in the meantime they both have jobs to do. They’re still trainees, rushed off their feet and aware of eyes watching them from all sides. Watching to see whether they toe the line (…there are a lot of stories about their activities at the Academy; there are still more about their activities in the mountains), how they deal with rudeness, with brusqueness, with _I-haven’t-slept-in-two-days-Farris-go-look-this-up-NOW_ (Jack returns with the correct paperwork and a cup of steaming coffee, with the precise preferred quantities of milk and sugar, and an unasked for but much appreciated sandwich).

Shooting perfect bulls-eyes every time, Laney can feel the eyes watching her form, her steady hands and the easy familiarity of her movements; she is aware of the eyes when she loosens a knotted cord or slips clever fingers between the feathers on her raven’s breast and tears the world open just enough to let a little magic spill over her fingers and gild those glossy black feathers with golden dust. They decided before walking into the Bureau for the first time that Jack would have to play distraction; her raven is well trained but these people are as well. Every so often they have semi-staged conversations with Jack’s gangly height obscuring anyone’s view of the bird’s beak while their daemons hold short, quiet conversations, the chameleon curled under Laney’s lapel. She knows her colleagues think she is antisocial and untrusting, or perhaps just aloof, but that is the price you pay for having a false daemon.

 _Well_ , says Jack when pressed about it, _Laney likes to know where she stands with people. It was a rough few months._ Co-workers nodded and smiled, having heard a few select versions about the antics in the mountains, having heard Rupert (Rupert who was missing, stolen, gone, _where is he where is he is he okay?_ ) dropped around the edges of conversations, a point of bitter recollection and driving motivation.

Jack is uncomfortably aware that at least one person here _knows_ he is the Giantkiller, and that several more either know or guess; he is even more uncomfortable that it is no longer something he has to keep secret. He feels the eyes when he picks up a sword in the training yard and when he cuts herbs into careful slivers to steep in oil, and wonders if they think he should’ve just picked one - hurting or healing (but he knows he’ll always do the first, and how could he live with only that?)

Laney goes out on a routine mission that turns into a near miss, because they’d underestimated how many Things would be in the area (because they hadn’t sent her in with Jack, and she forgot these Bureau folk wouldn’t know what she was going to do because they hadn’t fought side by side against worse odds; because they had sent Jack somewhere else and a corner of her mind was wondering if Farris had remembered there wasn’t a Jones at his left shoulder).

(He hadn’t)

She sees the bandages on Jack’s shoulder when they reconvene and sighs. He looks at the claw marks on her calf and gives a crooked smile.  
“Forgot I wasn’t going to be at your back?”  
“Forgot I wasn’t there to save your butt yet again?”

  
Their coworkers groan and ask them to move the reunion into the cafeteria, _please,_ because they’re blocking the door and everyone wants to fall onto a chair with a mug of tea. Laney is sorely tempted to go Elsewhere walking until she gets to Sally-Ann’s - somehow a mission isn’t the same kind of success when you aren’t settling down to triple-cooked chips and fish in batter light enough to float - but it wouldn’t be the same without Grey and Rupert anyway. Jack’s squirrel noses her raven gently, tail just flicking over the chameleon hiding in her hair, and she knows he’s thinking the same thing.

There’s a package waiting on her desk, tied with a precise knot that she doesn’t know, her name on the paper in Grey’s terrible scrawl. It’s a book - Jack, when he peers over her shoulder, exclaims in amazement that Grey _voluntarily_ entrusted a book over to the mail system. The first thirty three pages are instructions for different knots. The next ten are on Elsewhere theory - all in Grey’s spindly, ink-splattered writing, collected from books deep in the University library (Grey probably shouldn’t have been able to see them at all, but then that’s the problem with assuming everyone who could be a mage wants to be one).

The last fifty pages are hollowed out in the centre, and nestled in careful wrappings is a golden monocle.

After a moment of amazement that Sanders Grey has apparently _vandalised a book_ , Laney picks it up. Jack, reading the last page a little slower than her, looks up and raises an eyebrow.  
“D’you think it’ll work?” Laney grins, sharp and determined and utterly faithful in their Sage’s research.  
“Let’s find out.”

She steps through into the Elsewhere, leaving her raven dozing in the top of Jack’s wardrobe in case anyone comes by his room while she’s gone. The monocle glints in the light, polished glass with a yellow sheen, the rim etched with symbols she doesn’t know the meaning of. Laney sets it to her eye, and looks around. Jack’s squirrel is exactly where she should be, a wavering form in the golden fires, and she opens a window to check. Jack waves a lazy hand at her, not looking up from the burn salve he’s gone back to preparing at his desk. She seals up the window, and looks about. An excitable labrador catches her attention, and she smiles a little, following. It’s the cleaner, going down the corridor outside, and she starts to map out the Bureau just by following people’s daemons' shadows in the fire. Laney knows this is just experimentation, just testing the waters, so to speak, because Rupert could be _anywhere._

She trips over her own feet as a sudden change in direction of the daemon she’s following means she’s about to _touch_ it. It’s an old, ingrained taboo, even if the daemon isn’t actually there. The monocle falls into the fire and she lunges for it desperately. It’s gold and glass, and would be _so easy_ to lose in this golden world. Flat on her face on a non-existent floor, she holds the monocle to her eye again, vaguely curious. She’s standing by habit on what would be the ground in the real world. But the Elsewhere has no ground, and she knows already that levels is just a matter of how she walks, and where she’s trying to go.

When she sees the fox, she almost drops the monocle again, because she’s only ever seen one person outside of the deserts with a Fennec fox for a soul, and it’s utterly inconceivable that he would be in the Bureau.

Kneeling in the fire, Laney wonders how certain she is of the meaning of _inconceivable_.


	5. Part 4

Descending through the golden fire, Laney almost laughs when she realises that she has been here before. Mages are a sink in the Elsewhere, fire being syphoned off into the palm of people’s hands. Rupert isn’t a mage - Rupert is something else entirely.  
  
Rupert is a fountain. She had been so close.  
  
The fountain buffets against her, but Laney grits her teeth, and once she is past its margins she is in a calm blaze of golden fire. The shape of the fennec fox is at the eye of the storm, nose hidden under its tail and ears twitching. Laney has her hand pressed against the skin of the universe when she realises that the fox is listening to something. She turns, looking closely, and swallows hard when she recognises the other daemon in the room, blurry and indistinct in the outpouring of energy. It takes a certain amount of control not to tear through and blast Thorne to ashes, but she restrains herself. Now is not the time to charge in.  
  
Laney waits impatiently until Thorne is gone and tears herself a tiny window. The room is empty, so she tears it wider until Rupert is blinking in solemn surprise at the sight of her. She grins.  
“Hello there, Hero. Need a hand?” His smile is slow, cautious. The fox is stock still in her cage - Laney’s gut twists in fury at the sight - hopeful but just as cautious, wary. Her chameleon crawls over to Laney’s shoulder and flickers through a rainbow of colours until Rupert is smiling properly and the vixen has pressed against the mesh, eager eyes fixed on the pair of them. Laney steps through fully and examines the cage, explaining her plan.  
  
They both freeze as someone shouts in the corridor, a frantic, pleading edge to the sound. Laney vanishes into the Elsewhere in an instant. Whatever happens, she can’t afford to be discovered here. On a whim, she puts the monocle to her eye and walks towards where the sound had been. The patterns in the golden fires leap into focus, like staring at clouds, or the shapes between stars, and seeing an image. Three daemons go by. One is being carried, and there is something wrong with it. The images all flicker, outlined in fire, but this is different. Nevertheless, she thinks she recoginises the markings on it - the daemon of one of the mage slavers who’d captured her months ago.  
  
She paces along behind the rippling, writhing figure of the cat, waiting for the moment when the daemons of Thorne’s men are far enough away that she can risk opening the barest peephole for her own daemon to glance through. A dust mote, she thinks, that’s all they’ll look like from the other side. The daemon shudders, the fire flickering as usual, that edge of wrongness gone. But the shape leaps and twists frantically on the spot, terrified and trapped. Thorne’s men’s daemons have moved away, but not far enough to be safe for her to look. A criminal seeing a speck of dust is one thing, Thorne’s other agents is quite another. She may not like them all, but she respects them. Laney watches the cat’s movements, sees it hurl itself against an unseen barrier. She thinks cage, and then -  
  
It’s a sinkhole, like Grey only bigger, so much bigger and it’s dragging on her, golden fire streaming by and pulling her along. Her daemon’s sharp nip to the shell of her ear startles her into throwing herself out of that dreadful current, gasping. She flounders in the Elsewhere, watching as fire pour into the world. The current slows quickly to a trickle, then stops. The fire of the Elsewhere drifts around her, strange eddies gradually settling. With shaking fingers, Laney lifts the monocle to her eye.  
  
The dog - golden retriever? - and hare daemons are where they had been moments ago.  
  
The cat is gone.  
  
Laney knows what has happened before she looks, but she has to. She has to be certain. It doesn’t take more than a single pinpoint break in the walls of the Elsewhere once Thorne’s men are gone. A speck of dust from the other side. But then, she supposes a speck of dust might have been more obvious than she had assumed. She hadn’t known they were in a sterile room, every surface polished clean. The counter, the divided cage. The gleaming guillotine blade.  
  
Laney sees the blade and certainty closes around her throat. She’s seen this before.  
  
She closes the eye hole with crisp precision, and runs. She doesn’t know yet why Rupert is shut in a room below the Bureau, but she knows she has to get him out.  
  
For all that it’s been months, Rupert doesn’t ask questions, just gathers his soul gently up in his arms and follows her into the fire. He is stiff and unused to moving after weeks on end of being locked in a small room, but he grits his teeth and runs with her. They all know that Laney doesn’t flee from things that aren’t worth being very afraid of.  
  
They know as soon as they tumble through a tear in the Elsewhere that they have stepped into a world that isn’t theirs. Laney had thought far away and safe, and she had thought Grey, but first she’d found George, rushing through the fires of the Elsewhere and covering the miles faster than either of them would ever be able to run, and that was safe enough. The fluttering moth had been a beacon of hope.  
  
They know this is not their world because George is at the University, steadily showing hide-bound Professors and ivory-tower students that a girl from the mountains with no formal education can have a sharp mind and produce reasoned arguments on the fly, can study as though she is in love with the world she is reading about.  
  
They are standing in front of George, but she is not at the University. She is outside a bakery they both know well, sharpening a spear. There is an old scar across the bridge of her nose that they’ve never seen, hair long and braided back, and her brows knit in confusion and suspicion as they stumble on the grass. Her eyes catch on Laney’s clothes, on Rupert, and she stands, spear balanced and glinting in the sun, flashing gold as the fires of the Elsewhere behind them ripple in the air.  
  
Laney is not looking at George. She is staring over her shoulder at the man in the doorway, who is frowning back at her.  
“Liam?” Its a strangled croak, almost a sob, and she can’t deal with this, she can’t. She would never be able to deal with this, even without everything else she’s seen already in the past hour.  
  
“Laney!” It isn’t the delighted cry of a brother seeing his baby sister again. It isn’t even the confused exclamation of a man whose supposedly magic-less sister has just walked out of thin air into his far-off garden. It’s an almost annoyed, questioning shout that isn’t directed at her - or is it, she wonders? Because the girl who appears around the corner is certainly Laney Jones, but it’s a Laney in mountain garb, a Laney with hair cropped short and a different pattern of scars, no strings knotted around her limbs (but still with polished guns at her side). “Lane, what did you do?”  
“Whatever it is, wasn’t me.” Other-Laney draws both pistols, and Laney knows one is aimed at each of her and Rupert - Laney knows that Other-Laney will not miss if they make a sudden move, because they may not be quite the same person but she knows there is no universe where Laney Jones would point a gun at someone unless she was certain her aim is perfect.  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

Laney knows she should be talking, acting - something, _anything,_ to get them out of the literal line of fire, but she’s frozen. Idly, she wonders if everyone who stares down the barrel of a gun as she holds it in a steady grip feels this way, or if she’s simply frozen by her brother’s long-missed presence. Rupert is the one who talks, voice even and measured and polite. She hadn’t noticed it before the mountains, but now that she knows what it is Laney can hear the _calm_ in it. It isn’t magi, it’s simply that Rupert wants things to be fair and safe so strongly that it carries into everything he does.

They hold still while a suspicious Liam carefully relieves them of their weapons - Laney’s guns, which no-one at the Bureau was ever foolish enough to ever attempt to get her to leave in her room, and the small knife tucked into her boot. He checks Rupert over twice, apparently in disbelief that the boy isn’t carrying a single thing he could fight with.

“He’s been a prisoner for _months,_ where do you think he’d get a weapon from?” It’s the first thing she’s said, and her voice doesn’t shake at all. Anger is helping - she can see the tightness in Rupert’s shoulders, the determinedly restrained way Seba is sitting with her tail wrapped around her forepaws, and knows all he wants is to curl up and sleep somewhere safe, to breathe deep and finally realise he’s free.

Once, Liam had known her well enough to read all of that in the set of her jaw. But that was a lifetime ago, and now concern hides in the tilt of her chin instead, protectiveness in the way her daemon curls his own tail rather than bares his teeth. She watches the little whistling bird fan its wings and wonders if here that still means that her brother is amused.

Other-Laney circles her, curious. A sand viper winds its way down her arm, and Laney’s chameleon slinks to the tip of her finger to enter a staring match. Laney wants to examine her counterpart, to find the patchwork places where they differ, but her eyes are dragged back to Liam every time she tries. It’s George who eventually breaks the silence.

“Look, lets get them sat down. This one looks like he’s about to collapse.” Rupert smiles faintly.

“It’s been…a long few months. A long, very _dull_ few months.” He shoots Laney an amused look, a question hiding in the slight lift of one dark eyebrow. _Are you okay?_ “Though I think boredom may now be a thing of the past.” She grins back, squaring her shoulders a little more. _No, but let_ _’s get on with it._

Bea looks from one to the other of them when they’re escorted into the bakery, Other-Laney still holding a pistol in a loose, ready grip. The baker sighs, resting floury hands on her hips.

“I don’t care what nonsense you’ve gotten into, if there’s a fight in my bakery you’re all sleeping in the barn.” Liam laughs and kisses her on the cheek. Laney tries to pretend she isn’t watching hungrily, isn’t tracing Bea’s face for lines of grief that aren’t there. The familiar mountain cat daemon pads over sedately to pace a careful circle precisely a foot away from touching around both Laney and Rupert. Laney crouches automatically to set Jabari down so the daemons can greet each other. They’ve been through this before, in the mountains. This time, Mineko’s ears flick back in surprise before she deposits a genteel lick to the very top of Jabari’s head. Laney feels rather than sees everyone but Rupert’s eyebrows rise.

It’s a signal for everyone to relax a little. Other-Laney (reluctantly) puts her pistols away, and warm mugs are pressed into their hands. Liam lounges in a seat, watching Laney curiously while his sister (both of them) sits with a straight spine and carefully relaxed hands. Rupert loses his framework of formality as soon as he’s seated, the bakery and half the people there too familiar for his usual unconscious masks, and leans on one arm, exhausted with relief and stunned into silence. Liam breaks the silence.

“So, you reckon you come from some kind of…what, world one over?” Laney nods, and can’t help but notice that none of the half-strangers seem too surprised by this. Other-Laney notices her noticing, and grins sharply.

“We’ve seen stranger things than you can imagine.” Laney blinks slowly as she thinks about the creature of fire in Rivertown, Grey with mage fire dripping into being over his shoulders from Kin’s feathers unbidden and Rupert talking a vacant mage back into life, the daemon forms outlined in the Elsewhere fires, and grins back, not hiding any of her edges either.

“Oh, I’ve got a pretty good imagination.”

Hours later, it’s Rupert who leans forwards to nudge Laney and jerk his head at the gloom outside the window. She realises with an internal wince that she’s been gone for hours. Jack is probably quietly panicked. Thorne…Thorne will know Rupert is gone by now. She has to get back. Bea catches her eye, and nods firmly.

“Well, we haven’t covered half of anyone’s story, but it seems to me this lad needs to stay here for a bit - and you need to go find out a few things.” Liam stirs, and Bea brushes a hand over his. Other-Laney leans into his side, and he nods agreement after a moment. Laney hesitates herself.

“I’ve never done the walking between worlds intentionally. What if I can’t…” Rupert shrugs.

“You’ll find a way, Miss Jones. You always do.” She laughs, and ruffles his overgrown hair.

“Stay hydrated, alright?” He smiles softly, and she ignores George’s puzzled look.

Laney is opening a sliver of a window to check if the red squirrel she’s located is _her_ red squirrel before she realises that there had been no sign of other-Jack in the bakery. He looks around as she enters, partway through pacing around the room, and the sheer relief on his face throws her.

“Lane! What’s going on?”

“I - Liam.” Jack flinches and freezes, staring at her wide-eyed. Her brother is a topic they carefully avoid. Laney knows one day she’ll ask him for stories, but for now the wound is too fresh. Some days she feels like she’s fitting the mourning she should have done for the months before she knew into her days. Some days it’s just the hurt that he didn’t tell her. She understands why - at least, she tries to understand - but he didn’t tell her, even a hint, and she suspects that will never quite cease to sting. Laney clears her throat. “I found Rupe, and we ended up in a different world again. A world almost exactly like ours. One where Liam -”

She wonders if she looked the way Jack does now, when she saw him in the doorway. Hope and pain, grief and guilt - no, she probably didn’t look guilty. Liam’s death was nowhere near her hands, out of her reach to affect or prevent. She had no cloak of golden luck to blame for a near miss and an unlucky ricochet. Jack slumps onto his chair, Sayda curling into his collar, both pairs of eyes fixed on Laney. They're both trembling, she realises, and ploughs on with her explanation as though it will make it any easier to deal with.

"Rupe was _here_ , Jack." The instant anger helps; her brother alive in some neighbouring universe is one thing, Thorne laying hands on Rupert is another. "Thorne _took_ him. He’s been in the damned basement the whole time."

_“Why?”_

“We’re not certain yet. Rupert reckons he got wind of the - you know.” Jack nods. He remembers Rupert talking a mage back to life as well as she does. He’d been quietly jealous, memories of too many vacant people stumbling along as he drags them by the hand out of the cells, too many ghosts who’d been beyond his help. Neither of them speaks of it aloud. In the Bureau, you only spoke aloud of things you didn’t mind people overhearing, even in a closed private room.

With a deep, shuddering breath, Jack gets to his feet. He hauls two packs from under the bed. Laney grins, swift and sharp. Who needs to speak aloud when you know the plan already?

It’s time to go consult their Sage.


End file.
